21 December 2010

With 2010 nearing an end, we are all looking ahead optimistically towards 2011. In the world of web technology, we have not witnessed any major upheaval this year. Being head of marketing and SEO for Scream Media it's all but natural for me to become curious about what the future holds for us in 2011. The most interesting area to look forward to is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) without which no website under the sun passes the fitness test. The SEO domain has acquired a tremendous boost from the growing popularity of social networking sites and various improvements in search technology.

Social Media Optimization

Close on the heels of Search Engine Optimization, comes Social Media Optimization, the newest incarnation of SEO. I know that you are no longer surprised by this new term thanks to the tremendous popularity of social networking sites worldwide. Webmasters should not consider Social Media Optimization as a distraction from their normal SEO efforts; but this new activity should be deployed to boost a site's SEO prospects. Social Media Optimization activities may include back links from individual social media sites, development of a credible profile on these sites, and targeting towards real time searching. The greater impact you can have on the social networking sites, the more your SEO prospects will improve in the coming year.

Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities

There are some webmasters who rely on off-page optimization rather than on-page optimization. But in 2011, you should give equal, if not more, attention to on-page optimization. Most importantly, the site load time is going to be the litmus test. Google, in its effort to improve website performance, has decided to penalize those sites that have a longer load time. Also, improper use of Meta tags in website coding will have a negative effect on site rankings in the major search engines in the coming year.

The Web Is Going Mobile

Smartphones are getting more and more ubiquitous and people have started surfing websites on their mobiles more than ever. This trend is going to grow in 2011. The number of mobile Internet users has touched 90 million already. The need for optimizing your site for mobile users will naturally be more pressing. Your site needs to be optimized for relevant mobile applications, such as Google's Mobile Search Services and mobile keyword tool in AdWords. Google itself has stated that mobile search results take precedence over desktop search results when it comes to mobile searching. This underscores the need to invest your time and money in mobile SEO in the coming year.

16 December 2010

Using CSS and/or Javascript to re-order how content appears on a website, means that search engines get what they want and visitors get what they want. It's a win, win. For example, you can have [h1]Keyword Phrase[/h1] at the very top of your source code, but it is wrapped in a [div] tag called "displaynone" . Then at the very bottom of the source code is some javascript with a function called "DisplayH1" that actually displays the [h1] text at the bottom of the page. So, the [h1] is first in the source code, but last to display on the page in a browser.

One can also have several paragraphs of keyword rich text at the top of the source code, with [h] tags, keyword rich links, etc. However, you can also use [divs] and absolute positioning to have all of it physically appear at the bottom of the page when viewed in a browser, below all the links, pictures, etc.

This type of use of CSS can go a long way to getting your website to #1 & 2 in Google's organic results for competitive key phrases.

All sound a little Greek?! Give Scream Media a call on 021 559 0800 and we will take care of your SEO starting with the code for your website, using techniques like these above and more. Contact us today for a free no obligation SEO health check

15 December 2010

As a Google Pro Adwords company, we received this amazing video (featuring one of our clients from 2010 Kobi and Liel) We are very proud to be associated with Google Adwords, and invite you to try our Adwords PPC management services in 2011

14 December 2010

Wikipedia says: Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

Facts:
• More than 250 million active users
• More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Scream Media uses Facebook to connect fans to our products and brand. When we do a media campaign we use our main Kodak Facebook presence to increase its audience base. If we created different Facebook pages for each campaign it would dilute our message and work against building a core fan-base.

Twitter
Wikipedia says: “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.
Facts:
• 72.5% of the 44 million Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Twitter age demographic (% of total) Ages: 25-34 - 20%, 35-49 - 42%, 55+ - 17%

For your business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company, or anyone else, that you’ve had a great, or disappointing, experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

03 December 2010

Search and social go well together, and the search engines are finding more and more ways to use them together. In fact, the right combination's of these two elements could eventually dictate who has the most useful tools for users.
It's become more and more clear over time that having a strong social presence is helpful in building a strong search presence for a variety of reasons, but it's not been so clear, just how the search engines have looked at things like Twitter and Facebook profiles when it comes to organic search ranking.

Search Engine Land Chief Danny Sullivan posted an important article about this very topic, with some rare and surprisingly direct answers from both Google and Bing. While, neither exactly gave away their respective secret sauces, it would appear that they have set some things straight.

Google

Google reportedly uses when an article is retweeted or referenced in Twitter as a signal in organic and news rankings (even though links on Twitter are nofollowed). They also use it to enhance the news universal results (based on how many people share an article).

Google "computes and uses author quality" for when someone tweets. When Sullivan asked if they calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on who tweets it, Google Responded, "Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the 'Top links' section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search."

Google says it treats links shared on Facebook Fan pages the same way as tweeted links, but they have no personal Facebook wall data. Authority for Facebook Pages is also treated like Twitter.

So, the more authoritative the crowd sharing links to your content, the better. Not that different than PageRank.Bing

When it comes to Twitter, Bing tells Sullivan it also looks at social authority of users and more specifically, looks at how many people they follow and how many follow them, adding that this can add "a little weight" to a listing in regular search results (though it carries more in Bing's separate Social Search). Bing decides when links should carry more weight based on the person who tweets it.

As far as Facebook, Bing currently looks at links shared on Facebook that are marked as being shared to "everyone" and those from Fan Pages. "We can tell if something is of quality on Facbook by leveraging Twitter," as Sullivan paraphrases Bing's response. "If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate."